White-throated sparrows sing back at forth at sunrise—so much less intense than the song battle between phoebes at first light. A silent crow heads toward the compost pile.
phoebe
Thick fog at dawn, full of robin song and phoebe calls. Sunrise is signalled by little more than the growing thunder of pileated woodpeckers.
Warmish and overcast at mid-morning, with a smudge for the sun. One calling phoebe sets all the others off, until the hollow is ringing with their chants.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
Mackerel sky like a wrinkled brow. The spring is still singing about the last rain. The phoebe who called at sunrise flicks his tail.
A knife-thin moon fades into the dawn sky. The only cloud huddles in the bottom corner of the meadow, where a phoebe is calling.
Clear and still, with dew dripping off the roof and a pair of phoebes yelling “Phoebe!” at each other. Twenty-four years ago, the sky was just this clear.
Rain starts at sunrise and tapers off a half hour later. In its wake: phoebe, pewee, goldfinch, Carolina wren. A cedar waxwing’s whistle.
In the cool stillness, the snap of a phoebe’s bill on some unwary insect. The four-foot-tall aspen beside the driveway bends under the bird’s weight as he perches on its spindly tip.
The plaintive cries of what sounds like a fledgling crow up in the woods accompany the awkward sorties of a fledgling phoebe, beak snapping on a missed insect. Blue sky appears.
Cool and humid. A phoebe dives for an insect and gives it to a fledgling sitting on a walnut branch. In the shadows of the trees, white masses of mountain laurel blossoms.
Overcast and cold. A phoebe hawking insects from the lilac does far less flying than sitting, tail bobbing with what probably only looks like impatience.
Sunrise somewhere between showers, cold and sodden, the sky flat-white like the eye of a dead fish. No flies for the flycatchers, no sun for the wren.